About a Fridge Magnet

I have this stupidly loud fridge and since my kitchen is just a corner in my living room, the sound is omnipresent. Oftentimes in the evenings I just want silence, so I unplug it for a bit. Which is fine. Except there’s a catch: I obviously need to remember to plug it back in before going to bed, so the freezer doesn’t defrost.

So I came up with a little hack.

When I unplug the fridge, I take one of my many fridge magnets and put it on my bed. So later, when I walk into my bedroom, I see it sitting there land I’m reminder to go rescue my ever so slightly thawing frozen spinach and lasagna. It’s simple and it works.

Of course, now that it works, my brain has launched a counter-campaign.

It suggests, every time I switch off the fridge: “You don’t need the magnet any more. You always remember.” And in my mind, I talk back like: No, I don’t always remember. That’s the point of the silly magnet. The only reason I “always remember” is because of the reminder. I am not the X factor here. The magnet is. But my brain likes to think otherwise.

I find this both hilarious and disturbing: this nonchalance that appears the moment something is running smoothly. “Great, now that it works… let’s dismantle it.”

I know I'm not alone, this a very mundane human trait. Why are we like this, though?

Is it laziness? Despite the magnet-to-bed move literally being a 2-second detour from returning to the couch (my flat is very compact)? Yes, but I realised: it’s not only laziness.

There’s also something else — this other human instinct that is wired for evolving, and that says: Maybe I don’t need the scaffolding anymore. Maybe I’ve outgrown it.

Like a kid on a little bike with training wheels. Obviously, it’s only thanks to those metal side wheels that the kid isn’t face-planting into the pavement.

And of course, eventually you are meant to grow out of the training wheels.

The problem is: the brain doesn’t by default know which category a situation is in.

Some scaffolding is meant to be temporary — like training wheels. Some scaffolding is meant to stay — like guardrails or a seatbelt or, apparantly, my damn fridge magnet.

 Nobody in their right mind gets in the car one morning and thinks, “Ah, I’ve always used my direction indicators over the last fifteen years, surely I don’t need to use them today.”

And this is where it gets interesting, because this same glitch shows up everywhere. 

The exact same neural logic that tries to dodge the magnet is the one that convinces us:

• “I stopped taking my phone into the bedroom and that has inhibited me from scrolling past midnight. But it’s been a good week, I’m definitely past the old habit now. I can take the phone back to bed”

• “I can have an extra drink, I’ve always been fine before.”

• “I don’t need to write things down anymore; I’ll just remember.”

…right before they don’t.

It’s the weird entitlement of:  “The system works so well that I should remove it.”

And honestly, I don’t have a concluding life hack for this. All I know is that the moment something in my life starts running smoothly, I now try to pause before I congratulate myself and retire the structure. Because maybe I haven’t “become the kind of disciplined, evolved person who now always does xyz” — maybe I’ve just become the kind of person who humbly adopts a fridge magnet as a cog in her prefrontal cortex. And if that’s the tool that keeps my leftovers from becoming a biology experiment, so be it.

As the saying goes:  ‘We do not rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our systems and our training’ 

Not everything we lean on is a crutch, some things are infrastructure.

The trick, I guess, is knowing which is which.  On and upwards!